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Bookmarking Gets Distributed; Create Your Own Reddit on Your Own DomainAugust 26th, 2008 at 1:31 pmSource:Mashable! Coming out of a suburb of Sydney, Australia, SportsPassion is a networking service designed to provide sports teams of all sorts with tools to stay organized in season and out. Eminently free to use, SportsPassion is built upon an athletic-minded platform by the name of 3eep, which lists sites such as Freemyteam, Sportsplay, and Sportexx. Sportsplay, interestingly enough, appears to operate in all but parallel fashion to SportsPassion. The most outstanding differences are a slightly altered presentation and more generic dot-com domain for SportsPassion. The latter is naturally intended to attract a broader, more international audience. Leaving aside the matter of structural duplication, SportsPassion seems reasonably well equipped to serve its intended audience. It is unlikely that sport teams and groups of the extracurricular sort will require extensive features. The basics will presumably do for most users. Someplace to keep track of scheduling, changes, hasty and impromptu gatherings, celebrations and so forth. The usual stuff, really. Share documents, photos, and videos. Converse in a group forum. Etcetera, etcetera. Completing its list of uses, the service offers teams a unique RSS subscription for simple tracking when logged off. As for formatting, SportsPassion can be thought to be appropriately elementary. On the one hand, if a team page is barren, it’s noticeably so. The busier the better it seems. Which is pretty much how it usually goes in the networking world. It’s about what you do with the tools you’re given. In that sense, SportsPassion seems up to the task.
ProofHQ launches today as a Web-based solution for sharing, managing, and approving creative documents amongst team members and clients. In a few words, ProofHQ offers a way to get creatives approved more efficiently. How does a service set out to do this? For starters, ProofHQ offers a robust uploading tool that allows you to send large files to whomever you need. The ProofHQ Uploadr tool even lets you drag’n’drop files up to 75 MB directly from your desktop. From here, you can manage the files you’ve uploaded and determine who gets to see what. Other team members can review creatives from here, add their mark-ups and notes, participate in a real time discussion taking others’ feedback into consideration, and compare the many versions of that creative document that have been uploaded to your ProofHQ account. Similar in concept to services like cozimo, ProofHQ allows for visual markups of documents within its application, minimizing the need for every team member to have the correct software on the computer they’re currently using, and eliminating the need for constant file transfers. As far as accessibility goes, ProofHQ offers a number of ways in which you can share your uploaded documents, including integration with other professional project management tools like Basecamp. ProofHQ also has a Miniproof, which is a widget that can be embeded into blogs and websites. This could be used on third party sites that you and your team members often use (i.e. a private network that’s not included in ProofHQ’s existing integration options), or for a public voting option of sorts, where members of the community at large can voice their opinions on a given design. There are even branded options for a company or freelancer to use ProofHQ for their own purposes, with billing management options included. So far I like the fact that ProofHQ has set out to provide a set of tools that work with a group’s existing structure, and the fact that it’s leveraging the Web’s capabilities for automating much of the sharing, revision and communication necessities of any group project revolving around visual material.
Is the future of social news distributed? That certainly seems to be the thinking at a number of leading names in the space, with Reddit today announcing that their feature for creating your own version of the site is being extended to let you host it under your own domain and fully customize the look and feel. The move follows news last week that Ma.gnolia was going open source, and word earlier this summer that Digg is working on their own offering to let users create their own custom social news sites. While Reddit has offered an installable open source version (akin to Ma.gnolia’s offering) of its software since June, the create-your-own Reddit offering - originally launched in January - is a hosted solution. You setup your site by simply filling out a form and determining if your Reddit will be public, private, or restricted. Mashable’s Mark Hopkins and Steven Hodson are active participants in a custom Reddit that you can find here. With today’s additions, you can now use CSS to edit the stylesheet for your site, and setup a custom CNAME through your domain registrar to host your Reddit at a URL of your choice. Essentially, this gives you some of the flexibility of the open source solution, but without the complexity or technical know-how required to set it up. So why are all of the social news sites moving in this direction? In case you missed it, Muhammad Saleem had an excellent post yesterday arguing that bookmarking is dying. While that may or may not be the case – yet – it would certainly seem there may be a limit as to how much these sites can grow on their own as destination sites, especially with Yahoo Buzz now vying for mainstream users. Expanding into the business of powering other social bookmarking sites offers a new way for sites like Digg, Reddit, and Ma.gnolia to grow – even if it’s likely the same power users who ultimately create the niche communities. —Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Reddit Hacked, FixedReddit in Spanish, and More.Reddit Media - More Proof that Digg Needs a Picture SectionReddit River - A Lighter Version of Reddit for MobilesReddit Elevates Custom Reddits; L33t Crowd 3lat3dRIAA.com Down For The CountSlate Reddit Released
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